Cloudflare Research: TLS handshake size experiment

On a small fraction of our challenge pages, we've been running an experiment to measure the performance impact of a larger TLS handshake. We were performing these measurements to understand the trade-offs involved when switching to post-quantum secure ciphers and signature schemes.

What was the experiment?

For challenge pages that are part of the experiment, we launched two background connections. On these background connections, we disabled certificate compression and added one or more dummy certificates to the server certificate chain to increase the size of the TLS handshake. These changes do not impact the security of the connection.

Read about the results

Contact

You can reach us directly at ask-research@cloudflare.com with questions and feedback.

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